The pressure from your competitors is mounting. You may not know it, or see it, but it’s true – especially in a digital sense. More than ever, organizations are focused on developing applications that deliver next-level customer experience and/or improve internal operations.
In order to be first out of the gate with a new idea, businesses must speed up application design, development and implementation. This investment in innovation is transforming business models and paying off in heightened levels of customer satisfaction and cost savings.
But how do you ensure that you are the “early bird that gets the worm”? For most businesses, cloud is the key ingredient to do just that.
Cloud is key, yes… The answer? No.
Rather than straight cloud, we believe a hybrid approach is much more efficient platform for digital innovation. Much like your IT environment is unique, your hybrid cloud strategy will be too. You will want to integrate your traditional IT investments with new cloud services, to create a solution that is right for your business.
Through the years, we have helped several clients adopt a hybrid cloud model. Those migrations were most often fueled by the following business goals:
- Create new compelling solutions at speed
- Connect their existing capabilities to the cloud for the broadest reach
- Optimize their operations and service delivery to scale to meet demand
Let’s talk about each goal and the best practice we recommend to achieve them.
Creating new compelling solutions at speed
To foster innovation and optimize the customer experience, it is critical that new cloud apps can be rapidly built, deployed, improved and connected to existing servers with agile DevOps. Developers need the choice of runtimes supporting the broadest range of languages to maximize their productivity with access to the most innovative services. IT managers need a platform to deploy these at scale with the instrumentation to monitor adoption.
Best Practice: IBM Bluemix.
With tools and runtimes support for Node.js, Java, Swift and .NET, IBM Bluemix is a one-stop shop for developers. And with new features like Watson visual recognition and OpenWhisk distributed compute service being added all the time, it just keeps getting better.
Connect the billions of dollars invested in enterprise IT with new cloud services
Creating apps is important but it’s equally important that existing apps and data can be effortlessly published and consumed for innovation and monetization. For hybrid cloud solutions to work, backend data and customer-facing applications need to be connected to each other from anywhere.
Best Practice: IBM WebSphere Connect
Easily access cloud services directly from on-premise middleware. With more than 250 million global instances of WebSphere, IBM’s middleware portfolio touches approximately 80 percent of all global transactions. Developers and business leaders have the best of both worlds, opening up limitless possibilities for the broadest ecosystem access.
Optimize operations to scale
Optimizing workloads across cloud and traditional IT provides confidence, consistency and the freedom to take advantage of the latest technologies, choosing which “grow with you” environment is the best fit for your current and future needs.
Best Practice: IBM PureApp Service on SoftLayer
The portability and growth potential of these workloads is available for public, dedicated or local clouds. IBM’s new partnership with VMware makes this easier than ever.
Conclusion
Regardless of which on-ramp you take to hybrid cloud, it is increasingly evident that businesses want the flexibility and choice. The ability to integrate on-premise systems with cloud solutions has never been simpler. Businesses looking to push the innovation envelope can do so quicker and with more confidence by making the most of their existing investments and tapping into a new cloud solutions.
If you liked this blog, you also might like: Will You Disrupt or be Disrupted?
Stay connected online:
Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram
Subscribe to our newsletter: